CENSORED 09 - It's About Time!

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.  

Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published.  

Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Vaginal Davis offers insights into her collaborative practice of making music in art-punk bands in Los Angles and Berlin.

The artist Vaginal Davis certainly moves on dangerous ground with her transgressive shuffling of gender and genre boundaries. The self-described "sexual repulsive" co-founded several art/punk bands in her expansive 40-year-plus career, namely Afro Sisters, ¡Cholita!, Pedro, Muriel & Esther (PME), black fag and Tenderloin. As a writer and "Whoracle et Delphi", Ms. Davis turns her quirky hairy eyeball to the collective practice of making music in the saucy underground scenes of Los Angeles and Berlin. In their contributions, longtime comrades and collaborators Bibbe Hansen (artist and Warhol Silver Factory habitué) and Felix Knoke (guest performer for The Hidden Cameras and band member of Tenderloin) rave about joint performances and rehearsals, divulging sacred secrets and rifts. Bruce "Judy" LaBruce, Glen Meadmore and Lisa "Suckdog" Carver make surprise guest appearances, along with images from live performance spectacles The White to Be Angry, Trust Fund, Interracial Dating Game, We're Taking Over, Afro De Sade and Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life.

Edited by Jenny Schlenzka and Julia Grosse.
Texts and works by Vaginal Davis, Bibbe Hansen, Felix Knoke.

Published on the occasion of Vaginal Davis's exhibition at Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 2025.

Vaginal Davis is a Berlin-based American intersexed artist, queer icon of art and music. Vaginal Davis herself is a living work of art: a performer, writer and creator of iconic zines; a visual artist, experimental filmmaker; a self-proclaimed Blacktress and drag terrorist, a gossip columnist, influential socialite, educator and countercultural renegade. Since the late 1970s, her oeuvre has pushed the boundaries of art, music and performance. Inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers’ pursuit of social justice in the United States, she named herself after feminist and Black Power activist Angela Davis.

Sore is a serial anthology that brings together authors whose writing practices oscillate between the genres of diary keeping and fiction. For the second issue of Sore, ten contributors – both authors and visual artists – were invited to collectively develop their work through a series of informal critiques over the course of five months.

In the first issue of Sore, observations of everyday life intertwined with memories and cultural references to denote the significance of a certain soreness we each carry within us as we negotiate the various challenges of social existence. In this second ensemble, seven new authors widen our understanding of the term ‘sore’ by underlining a need to orient one’s gaze towards what’s hidden underneath, to enter the anatomy of all these necessary contortions and u-turns one performs in order to escape the grip of expected compliance.

With contributions from: Mathilde Heuliez, Lisa Lagova, Muyeong Kim, Nour Ben Saïd, Masha Ryabova, Adrienne Chung, Richard Dmitri Hees, Oscar Le Merle, Morra Kozlitina, Tindra Eliason, Helmer Stuyt, Ilya Stasevich, Kristina Stallvik.

Published by cover crop, Mathilde Heuliez & Lisa Lagova.

(...) There is no one on the chair, there is no hand on the table, perhaps nobody on the floor. The set up is empty, but some kind of unsettling presence is undeniable. The set up is so obviously fake that there must be something behind it. I am not going to lie: I am going to lie.
If I lie, there is a deliberated stand. I don't have to be "true", to myself, to others. My intention is not to find lying moving, but those who can never lie cannot grow either, cannot discover who they really are. The people, that every day are forced to rip off their personality into fragments, know something about themselves and about life that nobody could teach them. Lying, betraying, is to want to or be able to transform a situation, a fact, an emotion, oneself. The act of lying suddenly un-conceals what has been considered as neutral or as the reference point. The power relations already in place are being revealed, "normality" appears as hegemony. The lie embodies a transgression. It is an attempt to escape normative structures and the refusal to assimilate them. (...)

Includes contributions by Christian Noelle Charles, Andrej Dubravsky, Sandra Golubjevaite, Lewis Hammond, Tarek Lakhrissi, Nils Amadeus Lange, Floriane Michel, Stijn Pommée, Adam Ulbert

ACCESS/EXCESS (coercion, proliferation & mutation)

Contributions by Bob Ajar, Maziar Afrassiabi, Sam Basu, Matt Calderwood, John Chilver, Rhys Coren, Patrick Coyle, Arnaud Desjardin, Catherine Hughes, Thomas Lock, Paul McDevitt, Sean Parfitt, Cornelius Quabeck, Chico Stockwell and Katarina Zdjelar.

Schizm Magazine invites contemporary artists and writers to contribute pages in response to a theme which, as the title implies, engages with a paradoxical idea. Each issue combines archival material with original works and texts sent in by between ten to thirty contributors.

4ème numéro de l'épopée lesbienne en épisodes par la collective Fusion, ce recueil d'aventures se lit dans n'importe quel ordre.

The first issue of the magazine made by artists, founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal. Contributions by Mathias Augustyniak, Naomi Campbell, Théo Casciani, Michael Chow, Pan Daijing, Es Devlin, Claire Fontaine, Edwin Frank, Theaster Gates, Nicolas Godin, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Hedi El Kholti, Michèle Lamy, Paul McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Eileen Myles, Marc Newson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Ariana Reines, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Julian Schnabel & Jason Momoa, Hanna Schygulla, Juergen Teller, Iké Udé, McKenzie Wark, Robert Wilson, Yohji Yamamoto.

Alphabet is the artists' magazine. Here, they run the show. They write, they make images, they select their own works, they interview the figures they admire, they tell us what we did not know about them nor could have ever fathomed about life. This magazine is conceived entirely to put them in the driver's seat, and to enable readers to become part of the unique vision of some of today's greatest luminaries.

It is a manifestation of the creative community, coming together from all fields, from all generations and threads of culture. Writers, musicians, designers, painters, sculptors, poets—artistic figures of every kind converse all the time in their lives, but they did not have a shared space for their editorial projects. This is it.

Everyone who finds their way into Alphabet has made a mark on life, art, and culture, in a way that signals their importance to the present. Some of the contributors may be world famous, others well respected, others on the way to becoming the legends they already are. Their relevance to culture is the same, and that is why they all belong here, in the endeavor of the creative community. There is no hierarchy of status, or domain, or apparent impact. Some of the greatest revolutions happen undercover. Some of the most established voices are still breaking ground. The magazine's premise is simple: the old opposition between pop and underground does not make sense anymore. There are many creative communities, each following its own rules, each inventing its own space. Here, wherever they come from, whatever their community, artists can exist together, with the same intention of changing, and improving, what life is; with the same belief that art matters more than anything else.

None of the contributors is here randomly. They keep life thrilling and exhilarating, challenge the perception of everything and anything. Their role in shaping every aspect of life can hardly be overstated. That is why they needed a place to elaborate their own alphabet, their way of ordering and structuring language, the world, and the fabric of life—a place of freedom, where everything would be done to highlight their visions, where the very design would be a shrine to their magic. Even the distribution of the magazine was conceived with artists—each contributor suggesting sites of their liking.

Alphabet is also the magazine of magazines. Here, readers find essays, fictions, poetry, visual projects, DIY methods, recommendations from those who know, even games and astrology—and an artist's alphabet, articulating an entire universe. Anything that has ever formed a section of a magazine could find its way here. Even the cover is conceived by an artist: it was conceived especially by the legendary Robert Wilson. Artists will rejuvenate what magazines are, and magazines will be kept forever young by and with them.

Founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal, Alphabet is a bi-yearly art magazine. Not a magazine about art. It's a magazine made by artists. Each contribution like an œuvre, making it the ultimate collector piece. Each cover is designed, with the word Alphabet, by a different artist, initiating a cult series.